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Kacey Musgraves Sings Not-for-Grandma Country Music

By Carlo Rotella March 15, 2013 11:30 amMarch 15, 2013 11:30 am

Kacey Musgraves, whom I profiled in this week’s magazine, looks like the next big thing from Nashville. Part of her promise lies in her potential to address both a traditional mainstream country audience and also younger, more eclectic listeners. Her first major-label album, “Same Trailer, Different Park,” comes out next Tuesday. If you’re not familiar with her music, these three videos offer a quick introduction.

Musgraves first gained widespread attention with her first single, “Merry Go Round,” a Top 10 hit that paints a sharp-eyed yet sympathetic portrait of small-town life that’s darker in tone than country radio usually gets these days.

“Follow Your Arrow,” a catchy little anthem in praise of self-reliance, received an enthusiastic reception from an audience of radio programmers and other industry insiders when she previewed it for them at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium in February. (This video comes from a cellphone.) But you’re unlikely to hear the song on the radio anytime soon. Its mentions of same-sex kissing and joint-rolling put it beyond the pale for country radio’s strait-laced gatekeepers.

“It Is What It Is” sounds at first like an old-fashioned weeper in slow-waltz time about a romance that can’t last. But it is not, in fact, a weeper at all. It’s a love song about friends with benefits, country music for the hookup generation.

If you want to see her play live, on Saturday she begins several months of touring as an opening act for Kenny Chesney, playing stadiums packed with fans whose aesthetic priorities she jokingly summarized for me as “Beer! Guns! Party!” But Musgraves is confident she can find a way to reach them with her intimate songs. She said, “I’ll just have to do everything . . . bigger.”

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…